Nightline Daily Email: 5/30
W A S H I N G T O N, May 30 -- When baseball player John Rocker made a series of offensive remarks about blacks, homosexuals and various foreigners he was regularly booed on the field and even ordered by the Commissioner of Baseball to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.
But evaluation or no evaluation, Rocker's or anyone else's brand of racism cannot be labeled as a mental illness. Even Buford Furrow, who killed an Asian mail carrier and shot and wounded three children and two adults at an LA Jewish Community Center, could not have his extreme form of racism labeled a mental illness. Because psychiatrists have no such diagnosis.
Tonight's broadcast will explore a debate among psychiatrists: should extreme forms of racism be labeled as a mental illness? Tonight's report, from correspondent Michel Martin, was produced by longtime Nightline producer Joe O'Connor. Below is Joe's description of what you will see tonight. We hope you'll join us:
"Lay aside the notion, for a moment, that diagnosing extreme racism as a mental illness could be used successfully as a legal defense. The insanity defense is both rarely used and when it is, it is even more rarely successful. Even the skeptics among you, I would surmise, would have no problem calling the perpetrators of racism violence as sick, or even deranged. As my late mother, herself a person with mental illness used to say, 'there's something not quite right with those people.'
Tonight, we examine extreme racism, defined as delusional behavior that both impairs an individual to such an extent that he or she can neither hold a job nor refrain from committing violent hate crimes. But such a disability does not exist if you examine the official manual of psychiatric illnesses published by the American Psychiatric Association. In fact, according to Ed Dunbar, a psychologist who researches racism, the manual of diagnoses contains no recognition of pathological hatred.
So what, if anything could be gained with such a diagnosis? Perhaps, some say, we might discover what made these criminals act out in the first place. And, as proponents of this idea claim, some psychological intervention could be implemented to prevent this kind of violence in the future.
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